


and the city stood in its brightness

by betonprosa



Category: Young Wizards series - Duane
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:30:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betonprosa/pseuds/betonprosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's a wizard to do when it's just business as usual?</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the city stood in its brightness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marielaveau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marielaveau/gifts).



"_I have heard that voice many a time when asleep  
and, what is strange, I understood more or less  
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:_

day draw near  
another one  
do what you can."

—"On Angels," Czeslaw Milosz

 

 

 

 

"So," Dairine Callahan managed, as the last remnants of the world-gating wizardry collapsed, the gravitational and atmospheric adjustment subroutines kicked in, and her stomach finally decided that it would not be conducting an all-hands mutiny, "At least this time I didn't toss my cookies all over the welcoming committee's feet—"

"It's an improvement!"  Spot's eyestalks peered out from the messenger bag hanging at her hip. "You've not thrown up on four out of our last nine exoplanetary transitions—"

"I really wish you would quit keeping track of that particular data point, buddy."  She reached into the bag and pulled Spot free, nestling the notebook-sized sentient computer in the crook of her left arm.  "Okay.  Lay the operation specs on me one more time."

"Solar system Gliese 581, spectral class M3V, 20.3 light years from Sol.  Planetary system Gliese 581 D, moon designated as 581D-Prime—"  Data—the star's variable type, absolute magnitude, age, temperature, total number of planets— rendered in the thin, graceful characters of the Speech cascaded down Spot's screen.  "Assignment:  quarterly maintenance check and optimization of the remote-run Veganese Deep Space Listening Station, reassigned after illness, transferred from—" the computer emitted a blast of static, his closest audible approximation of the Vegan wizard's name "—And accepted by D. Callahan."

Dairine shifted him from one arm to the other, turning slowly in place to examine her surroundings.  This far out from the dim red dwarf star at the heart of the Gliese system, local afternoon took on the stillness of twilight on Earth, shading the rock and ice-studded terrain with washes of shadowed violet.  The blue crescent of Gliese 581 D hung heavy against the horizon, encircled by a fine haze of dust and moonlets, and in the rapidly darkening sky she could pick out a few familiar stars glittering at unfamiliar magnitudes through the moon's faint wisp of an atmosphere.

"—here for a standard examination of the Veganese DSLS.  Got it.  Brrr."  She shivered and rubbed her hands together, the movement made clumsy by thick quilted red mittens, and focused on the comfortingly bright glow of the exterior lighting of the station, one and a half kilometers away. "Amp up the heat-generation subroutine, would you?  There's reading about hundreds of degrees below in the précis, and then there's the reality of hundreds of degrees below.  Which is unpleasant.  Remind me again of why I volunteered for this?"

The warmth of her tiny bubble of air increased noticeably.  A tinny recording of her own voice emerged from Spot's speakers:  "_To get out of the house, good grief, why else?_"

Spot's CPU whined with amusement as she eased him back into his carrying bag.   

"No comments about the failures of human logic, now."

"I," the computer said primly, "would not dream of it."

-

On paper, a short walk had seemed an ideal way to conduct an initial examination of the site while checking that the geothermal wizardries connected to the sputtering thermal core of the moon still pumped power into the station.  In practice—Dairine picked up her feet, stepping with the studied care of a dressage mount over a honeycombed patch of bad ice—in practice, she'd rarely had a worse idea.  _Well.  There was that time when—but the rotation speed of this ice cube means you've got less than twenty minutes left before the light starts to go_, she reminded herself grimly, _and still way too far to go before the station, so you better walk faster, unless you've got plans to become a human-shaped Popsicle out here, Callahan._

Snow crystals tinkled against the outer boundaries of the wizardry providing her with breathable air and warmth as the winds slowly began to pick up speed.  Cold was seeping in through the wizardry's fraying edges, and she was already breathing hard, exhausted with the effort of powering the intertwining spells.

"0.3278 kilometers to go," Spot reminded her, and she could almost feel him huddling closer.  "Remaining time before moon rotation causes light levels to—"

Ice crumpled beneath her feet, and she stepped out into nothingness.

-

Her fists clawed desperately at the too-smooth sides of the ice crevasse.

—_transfer the kinetic energy of falling, carry the gravitational constant, factor in—_

Pain shattered the patterns of the growing wizardry from her mind, and darkness tinged through with laughter rose up to swallow her.

-

"—Dairine," her mother said, and Dairine turned from the mountains of dough swelling under her hands.  "You've—what did you—"

_A few days, a week, a month—we're not sure_, the oncologist had said to her father, as Nita'd wheeled their mother down the hallway.  _It's—well, we weren't expecting her to even be alive after that surgery, to be perfectly honest—_

"Cinnamon rolls, Mom," Dairine snapped, and ducked her head, unable to meet her mother's eyes.  "Your yeast was dead.  I had to—jump start it, and this, _this _grew—"

"Dari, honey—" Her mother sighed, and shuffled over to one of the kitchen chairs, sitting down with painful care.  After the first attempts at chemotherapy, she'd come home from the hospital, situated herself in a cocoon of quilts on the sofa, and announced that if she was going to die, it wouldn't be handcuffed to the toilet, thank you very much.  Now, her mother waned day by day; her hair, once as bright as Dairine's, had faded and thinned, and her eyes sat deep in her face, the skin stretched paper-tight across the bones beneath.

"I shouldn't have bothered?" Dairine asked, pounding furiously at the dough.  "I should've let it go, forgotten about it—"

"No," her mother said quietly.  "No.  Dari, I—your sister—"

_It's not fair, it's not _fair, Dairine wanted to scream.  _I've saved stars, planets, even the universe, and not her? I can't even—_

She burst into loud, angry tears, and when her mother came, slowly, to hug her, Dairine smeared dough across both of their shirts.

-

"Dairine," Spot said, close to her ear.  "_Dairine_.  Your extremities may have sustained damage.  You are—"

-

"Peary Crater, Mom," Dairine said, and reached over to smooth the shawl pooled around her mother's shoulders.  They stood at the lip, looking down into the shadowed depths of the crater. "Nearly at the lunar north pole, and because the axial tilt of the moon's so small, the sun never sets on these mountains—well, there's lunar eclipses and all, so that's a bit of a misnomer—"

"Peaks of eternal light," and her mother's worn face lit with joy.  

"Yeah," Dairine said heavily.  "Mom, I—"

"I was eleven or so, that year."  Her mother sighed, and threaded her arm through Dairine's.  "1968.  I remember—coming down to breakfast, my father throwing the newspaper away before I saw the photo from Vietnam that I saw anyway, two days later on the evening news.  Pulling the muscles and spending six months not dancing—everything went wrong that year, it seemed.  Everything.  And on Christmas Eve, we had the radio on, listening to Bing Crosby, and they interrupted the music for a special message from the Apollo astronauts.  And they read—"

"_In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth_—"

"It was—like a benediction on the whole, awful year.  Like a promise that the next one would be better.  Dari, I—" Her mother was crying, silently and awfully, tears dripping into Dairine's hair.

"The cinnamon rolls were like hockey pucks, weren't they."

Her mother let out a strangled whoop of laughter.

"Your dad broke a tooth.  Nita fixed it and made him promise not to tell you—"

-

"—_Dairine_," Spot warbled, his voice emerging from somewhere underneath her jacket.  "Respond.  I am incapable of movement—"

_Crevasse must've narrowed_, and the words pieced themselves together slowly in her mind as Dairine's eyes crept open.  _And I fell the wrong way_—she could feel the bulk of the messenger bag and her left arm twisted beneath her—_oh, this is bad, Callahan_.

"Spot," she tried, and choked back a gasp of pain.  "What's our—status?"

"Atmospheric modulation wizardry will shortly collapse.  Death by exposure is imminent without prompt action—"

"Tell me—something I don't know, buddy!"

"The provided exit world-gating wizardry parameters are set.  You only need initiate them, and—"

"Go," she hissed, in the Speech, and the wizardry washed over her.

-

"_Dairine Eliane Callahan_," and Nita's voice swelled with exasperation and relief as her younger sister's ulna reshaped itself beneath her hands.  Spot perched on the end of Dairine's bed, his stalk eyes twitching with concern.  "I don't care if you think— _near death experiences are not_—"

"Shut it," Dairine croaked, and pulled a mound of blankets up to her chin.  "Didn't see _me_ with my underwear in a bunch during the Song of the Twelve business, did you?"

"I'm one to talk on that count, I suppose."  Nita grinned ruefully, and stepped away from the bed.  "There.  Get some sleep, runt."

"If I have to," Dairine mumbled, and her sister laughed softly as she switched off the lights.

-

_Sunrise gilded the snow-capped mountain peaks ranging up and down the horizon.  Against the base of the mountains, skyscrapers reared up against the clouds, wreathed in the last wisps of an early morning fog.  
_

_The laughter of her mother rang across the stillness like church bells—_

_"What's loved, lives, sweetheart_—"

-

She woke to the smell of bacon frying and her father's voice lifted in outrage at an outfielder's incompetence.

  
Smiling, she went down to breakfast.


End file.
